


Wreckage

by Ignaz Wisdom (ignaz)



Category: due South
Genre: F/M, dS het
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-01
Updated: 2006-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-01 23:44:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignaz/pseuds/Ignaz%20Wisdom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A second chance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wreckage

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted a Frannie story, since this was written for the [Get Frannie Laid](http://frannievecchio.livejournal.com/499.html) challenge, but this ended up being mostly Ray. For that, I apologize, or maybe not, because I love Ray and I liked how this came out. All comments, including concrit, are welcome.

Frannie, it had to be said, looked nothing at all like Stella. She had great big brown eyes and skin like warm honey. She wore her hair long, dark, and curly. And there was something awkward and girlish about her, like she hadn't quite grown out of dolls and fairy tales. Or at least that's what he thought he saw at first glance, from a distance, surrounded by cops and barbeque smoke and blistering sun. When he got up close though, close enough to look in her eyes, there was something else there, something older and sharper and wounded.

There was something sharp about Stella, too, but not like Frannie. Stella's was an offensive, not a defensive, sharpness. Stella was all steel and angles, expensive suits and pointy little shoes, neat blonde hair and practically manicured nails. There was very little that was soft about Stella, especially towards the end. But Frannie -- Frannie was all softness, all curves.

When he met her, she was wearing a blue dress covered in some kind of little flowers. _Daughter_, he thought, or maybe _wife_, but no -- she was there with her cop brother, a guy she didn't name and he never met, at least not until years later.

He was on his third beer, or maybe it was his fourth, but he still had it together. He was a together kind of guy, a good-looking guy, and if his wife had left him six months ago -- well, what did she know? Stella wanted one thing out of life and he wanted something else. He didn't know what that was, but maybe it started with the pretty brunette standing by the picnic table. He rubbed his thumb idly over his ring finger, still not used to its bareness, and made his way over to her.

And when he asked her if she wanted to get dinner the next day and she said yes, he felt like a million bucks.

* * *

He wasn't sure how they ended up sleeping together, or whose idea it was. He'd been off the dating circuit for more than a decade, but he sort of remembered that most women needed some serious wining and dining beforehand. But she'd been married and divorced, too, so maybe by then they'd both been around long enough to decide to forget the script.

He did remember the way she kissed: like someone without a lot of practice but with a hell of a lot of enthusiasm. There was something wrong about that, though. He knew she'd been married, and he was pretty sure she'd dated, but she still kissed like a sixteen-year-old on a first date. Frannie kissed like a woman who hadn't been kissed much -- at least not by someone who really meant it.

But Ray had been married for more than ten years, most of them even happy. So he took her in his arms and kissed her like he'd kissed his wife, a whole lifetime ago, back when Stella still believed in that sort of thing. He kissed Frannie's face and felt the fine, invisible down on her cheek; he skimmed his fingers over her breasts and dipped his tongue into the dimple of her navel. He tasted her salty-sweet flesh as she pulsed and shuddered around his mouth, undulating like the sea. And as he sank into her warm depths, he thought: _this time, it just might work._

* * *

They'd been together for a week, hardly any time at all, when his lieutenant, a guy named Fletcher, called him into the office and slid a thick manila file across his desk. He knew without asking that it was an undercover assignment, not his first and unlikely to be his last. This one was pretty ugly. He wouldn't have to hurt anybody, but he wasn't going to like himself a whole lot at the end of the day. And there were kids involved, and he was nothing if not a sap for that kind of thing. He even had to admit that the guy in the mug shot, the guy he had to pretend to be, looked an awful lot like him, or like how he might have looked if he'd gone into being a world-class scumbag and not a cop. Things were going to change, and they were going to change with a vengeance.

There was maybe a point where he could have said no, where he could have said "thanks but no thanks," pushed the folder back across the desk, and walked out the door. Maybe. Like everything else in his life, he wasn't really sure that he ever had a choice.

He told Frannie that night after dinner, lingering over the check. He was straight about it; she was a cop's sister, after all.

"This job," he said, "it's gonna take me pretty deep under, and we don't really know for how long."

Her coffee-brown eyes, once warm, were already starting to cool. She bit her lower lip very gently and then released it again.

"So I guess ..." he ventured.

"This is goodbye?" she suggested. A corner of her pink lips turned up, but her eyes were already starting to glimmer.

"For now," he insisted, wanting to salvage anything he could of this, and knowing it wasn't going to happen.

"For now," she repeated, averting her eyes. She glanced down at her empty water glass for a moment, and then she stood, holding onto her purse like he might try to take it from her. "You know," she said, "I really thought you were different. I thought you were the kind of guy that a girl --" She stopped abruptly and tossed her head like a startled pony, arching her neck. Then she nodded at him, distant but polite, polite but cold. "Ray," she said in acknowledgment, and then she turned and left.

He sipped his lukewarm coffee, hating himself with every fiber of his being, and watched her go, thinking -- wrongly, as it happened -- that he would never see her again. But when he did see her again, all those years later, it would be too late. They would have been tossed around, washed up on the rocks, and there would be nothing left to salvage of them -- smashed to splinters, lost at sea.


End file.
